Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Sometimes
a movie needs only one great scene for me to fall absolutely in love with it.
In Shield
for Murder (1954), it’s when Edmond O’Brien stops
into an Italian restaurantand finds
himself at the bar sitting next to Carolyn Jones. She’s one of those types you
see in the older movies, petite and blonde, but with fingers like claws. She’s
a barfly; she tries to get him to buy her a drink, or at least talk to her. He
has other things on his mind.

Most
guys would love to rub up against Jones in a bar. But O’Brien is involved in
some bad stuff. He’s Barney Nolan, a police detective; he’s killed a
bookmaker’s stooge who happened to be carrying $25,000. Thinking no one was
watching, Nolan took the money. He’s a mix of hardboiled cop who cares for
nothing, and a normal, working-class guy who just wants to settle down in a
house he can call his own.But his reputation
for violence has raised suspicion about him. He’s starting to sweat.

Jones,
meanwhile, keeps working on him. “You aren’t so tough,” she says. She teases
him, saying he doesn’t know how to look the part. She tells him to hold his
cigarette a certain way, and to squint his eyes. In short, she’s telling him to
look more like Humphrey Bogart, the blueprint for toughness in those days.
Nolan plays along; he chuckles. A while later he notices a couple of gunmen who
have been trailing him. They’re working for the bookie, and they’ve got balls
enough to walk right into the restaurant. He walks over to them and, with the
butt of his revolver, smashes them both into bloody heaps. Confronted by real
toughness, Jones can only scream in horror.

O’Brien,
who’d spent time on the New York stage in productions of Shakespeare, was one
of the few actors who could pull off such a scene. He didn’t look particularly
dangerous – he could’ve been a high school football coach, a bus driver, the
owner of a butcher shop – but he was burly and looked like he could do some
damage if riled.

Shield for Murder was based on a novel by William
P. McGivern, a pulp writer whose stories provided the basis for some excellent
crime movies of the period (The Big
Heat,Odds Against Tomorrow).
O’Brien shared the director’s credit alongside Howard Koch. According to press
releases, O’Brien rehearsed the actors, while Koch took over once filming began.
O’Brien said at the time that he hoped to become a full-time director, and that
he’d prefer to be known as “a new director, rather than an old leading man.”

The
screenplay, credited to Richard Alan Simmons and John C. Higgins, is slick
enough that an entire story could’ve been made of the deaf man who witnesses
Nolan kill the bookie’s runner. Another movie could’ve been made of the
character played by John Agar, a younger detective who idolizes Nolan but
suspects he’s done something foul. That none of the film’s moving parts get in
the way of each other is a testament to old-school moviemaking. And the
dialogue? Superb. “You’ve had enough for one day,” Nolan tells one particularly
abrasive cop. “Now go home and beat your wife.” Then there’s the older cop who
grouses, “I’ve gotten old in this office, with a snail’s eye view of man’s
inhumanity.” Good stuff.

And what
of Carolyn Jones as the blond tootsie?She’d been in features for about a year – she’d had roles in The Big Heat and House of Wax -and in the
next few years she’d work for such directors as Billy Wilder and Alfred
Hitchcock. She’s near brilliant here. Some actresses would play the barfly role
for laughs, others would aim for pathos, others would go for sleaze. She hits
all three.

In the
original trailer for the film, which is included in the excellent new DVD
available from Kino Lorber, the ad campaign made it look as if Nolan left his
fiancée for a fling with Jones. That’s not what the movie is about at all, but
publicists probably wanted a clip of Jones in the trailer, just for some
enticement. Why not? All is fair in marketing, especially when a cutie like Jones is
concerned.

Consider,
too, the explosive shootout between Nolan and the gunman played by Claude
Akins. Akins is one of the fellows Nolan clobbered in the restaurant; with his
head bandaged, he tracks Nolan down at a YMCA swimming pool where they open
fire on each other. It’s madness, as swimmers run for cover, hide under
bleachers, or dive into the pool to avoid the rain of gunfire. This shows how
far Nolan has fallen; he doesn’t even care if innocent people get hit.

Contrast
this to the way Nolan slouches around the police station, leaning on filing
cabinets and listening to others talk with a look of thinly disguised disdain.
He’s a veteran cop, he’s seen it all, and he doesn’t break a sweat for
anything.

Then
there’s a surprisingly light scene where Nolan brings his bride to be (Marla
English) to the new tract home he plans to buy. He’s like a big kid as he
proudly shows her all of the fixtures. The life he plans for them, complete
with modern kitchen appliances and a two-car garage, sounds delightful; he’s
invented it in his mind, perhaps to occlude the grotesque reality of his life
as a crooked cop.

Is this
the real Nolan? A gentle, friendly guy who happily tells his girlfriend to kick
her shoes off and take a nap on the new couch? Granted, he uses this moment to
sneak out and bury his stolen money in the backyard, but his glee at showing
off his new home is infectious. For a moment, you almost wish the guy’s dream
of a normal home life could come true.

Everyone
respects Edmund O’Brien as an actor, but is he truly appreciated for all of his
great work? Shield For Murder takes
place during his peak years, shortly after his turns in movies like White Heat,D.O.A., and The Hitch-Hiker,
but before his great comic performance as Marty ‘Fats’ Murdock in The Girl Can’t Help It. The same year he
played Barney Nolan, he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance
in The Barefoot Contessa. By the
1960s he was still working regularly, but was slipping down to sixth or seventh
billing. He’d become one of those reliable types, the kind of actor who could
deliver a solid performance, but wouldn’t steal the spotlight from the bigger
stars. Director Don Siegal claimedO’Brien’s eyesight and memory were troubling him as early as China Venture (1953), when he was not
yet 40. This was perhaps a harbinger of the Alzheimer’s disease that would
ultimately kill him at 69, and might explain why O’Brien contented himself with
smaller parts. His plan to become a director wasn’t to be, either. At his best,
though, O’Brien was a sort of genius.

In Shield For Murder, he’s surrounded by
capable performers, including Jones, Akins, Agar, Richard Deacon, Vito Scotti,
William Schallert, and in the role of the mute, a very touching Ernst
Sternmuller. Yet, it’s O’Brien who owns this one. When he meets his grisly end
outside of his beloved dream home, collapsing from a bullet wound onto the
unplanted lawn, you’d be forgiven if you felt some sympathy for him.

“No
actor who plays himself is a happy person,” O’Brien once said. If so, the man
who could sing ‘Rock Around The Rockpile’ in The Girl Can’t Help It, as well as play the tortured, murderous cop
in Shield For Murder, must have been
happy for a while, indeed.

Tuesday, September 27, 2016

The Lovers and the Despot is one of those
documentaries where the subject is far more interesting than the resulting
movie. One would think that the tale of a major political figure who kidnaps an
actress and her director husband to help his country’s
flagging film industry would be riveting and filled with intrigue
and drama. And it is, sort of. But it’s told in such a dreamy manner that one
starts to doze off. It's a gentle, sleeping pill of a documentary. Then again, some stories are so bizarre that they can overcome almost any flaw in execution.

The
movie, written and directed by Ross Adam and Robert Cannan, sifts through a
mountain of material to tell the story of North Korean dictator Kim
Jong-Il, who happened to be a movie lover, and his abduction of Choi Eun-hee, a woman who, for lack of a better comparison,
was the South Korean Meryl Streep. She’d starred in several films for her
husband, Shin Sang-ok, a major figure in the South Korean film business. We see the two at various red carpet
events, and in clips of the movies they made. They were a cool couple, hobnobbing with Marilyn Monroe and looking
incredibly stylish in their dark glasses; they were the epitome of 1950s South Korean
swank. When Choi vanished, Shin followed. He, too, was taken into captivity. The
dictator gave Shin an incredible opportunity: massive resources were his to
make any sort of movie, provided it showed North Korea in a positive light. Not
surprisingly, Shin grew to like the idea. After a couple of escape attempts, he understood that working for Kim Jong-Il wasn’t such a bad gig. Shin and Choi remained in North Korea for eight years, and made eight features.

There
are some artful flourishes in the movie, and we get a fairly complete impression
of the couple in captivity. She’s elegant, an actress who seems to come alive
while working, but otherwise is rather meek and unassuming; he’s got enough
swagger for two, squinting his eyes like Bob Mitchum after taking a drag
off a Marlboro. We learn that Shin was a bit of a bum when it came to finances,
which could explain why he enjoyed working for Kim Jong-Il, and we hear
the dictator’s voice on tape, complaining about the sorry state of his country’s
films. “Why so much crying?” he asks. I especially liked the South Korean
intelligence agent involved in the case. He was tough but light, like an old
weed that had survived several hard winters. He deserved his own television
series.

Shin
and Choi were already done as a married couple by the time they were relocated
to North Korea – he’d had an affair with a lesser known actress that resulted in two
children, which was, apparently, enough for Choi to get the message. “He never
said he loved me,” Choi says at one point. Later, she adds, “He loved me more
than people knew.” The pair was reunited while in
captivity. This turned out to be what they’d needed to rekindle the old flame; they
would stay together until Shin’s death in 2006, 20 years after making their
daring escape from the clutches of Kim Jong-Il.

All
of this should’ve been twice as romantic, and twice as dramatic. I should’ve been weeping
when they were reunited, I should’ve applauded wildly when they made their
getaway, and I should’ve been hating Kim Jong-Il. Instead, Choi plays
everything too quietly, as if she's still worn out by the eight years she spent in North Korea. And Kim Jong-Il, strangely enough, comes off
as the star of the piece. He’s oddly charismatic. Trying to break the ice when
he first meets Choi, he says “Don’t I look like a midget’s turd?”

As
for Shin, aside from his dashing demeanor, we don’t get to know him very well.
We certainly don’t learn much about his films. Clips are used throughout
the documentary, but we can’t gather what sort of filmmaker he’d been in his South
Korean heyday. He seemed to bounce from period pieces where Choi did evocative
fan dances, to movies that looked like Korean versions of spaghetti westerns.
His black and white footage looks lovely, like clips from a Fellini movie, and
I also liked the color footage from a later film – it reminded me of Bunny Yeager’s
“stereo photography” of the ‘50s. Still, I couldn’t tell you shit about Shin as a
director. Not from this documentary, anyway.

What
comes across in the movie is that North Korea is a strange place, emotionally
stunted until it’s time for a military parade or a dictator's funeral. Then, the tone becomes
something akin to the Nuremburg rallies, with enough pomp and glitter
to frighten anyone looking in for the first time. Was this, I wonder, the goal
of the filmmakers? When we see footage of Kim Jong-Il’s 2011 funeral procession, with the loyal
citizens practically apoplectic with emotion - obviously forced - it feels like we’re looking at
another sort of propaganda film, one to make us think North Koreans are simply crazy. What
does the average person know of North Korea? Not much. But, thanks to our media coverage, and constant mention of nuclear missiles, we’re supposed to be
scared of the place. And this documentary, with its use of certain images, appears to be saying it’s OK to be scared.

A
final shot of Kim Jong-un, the tubby son of Kim Jong-Il and the current leader
of North Korea, is meant to be ominous,
like the pics of Adolph Hitler that pop up at the end of World War One
documentaries, a note that something grim is yet to come. Hmm? I’ve heard that North Korea wants to
enter the space race. Maybe they’ll kidnap Buzz Aldrin for some inspiration.

Monday, September 19, 2016

It
wasn’t enough for Laura Albert to write books under the pseudonym “JT LeRoy.”
She had to create an entire charade, enlisting Savannah Knoop, her boyfriend’s
half-sister, to pose in public as JT. That JT was supposed to be male was easy to get
around; Albert had described the JT character as an androgynous little teenage
boy, so Knoop had only to put on dark glasses and a wig and voila: a wispy
little twink of an author, readymade to meet her fans, which included such
literary pundits as Bono and Courtney Love. Not wanting to miss out on the
action, Albert passed herself off as JT’s manager, complete with British
accent. This may be hard to follow - and it gets even more complex - but it all makes sense in Jeff Feuerzeig’s Author: The JT LeRoy Story, a dynamic
documentary about a strange blip in publishing history. It's breathlessly narrated by Albert like a criminal confessing a small
crime; her tone, not surprisingly, is one of ‘What’s all the fuss about?” The
books, she says rightly, are labeled "fiction." Anything else, she says, is
extra. Agreed.

Albert
didn’t need a fake persona to sell books. For readers who prefer their authors
to be on the damaged side, Albert’s own messy life would’ve worked just fine.
She went from being an obese child to a phone-sex operator, which isn’t quite
as exciting as the teen male prostitute that JT LeRoy was supposed to be, but
it’s not bad.

Of
course, Albert makes the story a bit sticky when she insists that JT LeRoy
really existed, deep inside her, like a ghost or something. It’s not a split
personality, she insists, but rather, he came to life in her one day when she
called a suicide hotline and took on a boy's persona in order to talk to
a counselor. Hence, JT was born. (Albert had been doing this sort of thing for
years, but JT was the first of her male alter egos to have literary
aspirations.)

Albert
may come off as slightly creepy when she goes on about JT being real, but she’s
no less creepy than Stephen Beachy, the New
York magazine writer who uncovered the harmless sham as if he'd stumbled upon
the Watergate scandal, or the various rock stars who try to befriend the
teenage hustler turned writer named JT. (Is Tom Waits so bored that he has to
make personal calls to teen writers?)Walter Werzowa’s score, which sounds more than a little like Lou Reed’s ‘Street
Hassle,’ weaves ominously through the story as one gullible celeb after another
becomes smitten with JT, played with growing confidence by Knoop. Halfway
through the movie, when Knoop, as JT, reads in front of a massive audience in
Italy, I found myself nodding appreciatively. When a ruse goes that far, and is
executed with such flair, you have no choice but to tip your hat.

There’s
nothing here that made me want to read the JT LeRoy books – despite the
original flush of publicity where buffoonish critics hailed JT LeRoy as the
torchbearer of Genet and Burroughs, it sounds more like ersatz Southern gothic
to me, with truckers and hookers and wayward children on the streets – and the
fact that so many rock singers liked these books makes me guess Albert piled on the smut and used a
lot of easy words. But I did come away liking Laura Albert. She’s grown into an
attractive middle-aged woman, even if she has that nervous, unbreakable gaze
seen in certain barflies, the ones who seem friendly but may get your wallet.

Feuerzeig
previously directed The Devil and Daniel Johnston,
another documentary where rock stars rallied around an outsider figure.
That film, made in 2006, had more depth and emotion than Author: The JT LeRoy Story. Ultimately, Johnston was a much
more tortured soul, and more of a danger to himself. Albert will simply
cash in her dime’s worth of celebrity and continue to write, though I think
she’d give it all up to hang out with rock stars. Also, despite being fascinating, the movie ends too
quickly. Albert mentions a nasty childhood incident, and then we learn that she
paid a meaty fine for signing a book contract as Leroy; she now writes under
her own name. And that’s it.

Albert is inscrutable, though she talks a blue streak. I sensed a real
vulnerability about her, which could explain why so many were drawn to her when she pretended to be JT on the phone. But
why does it seem that every call she made was recorded on a cassette
tape? Did she know they’d be useful in a future documentary? And where’s JT
LeRoy nowadays? Is he still guiding Laura Albert’s stories, while she’s only signing
them? Who’s driving the ship now?

Monday, September 12, 2016

Full
confession: I’ve never enjoyed improv comedy. There’s something repulsive about
people who are so starved for love that they’ll take suggestions from an
audience and try to create something funny. Part of my disdain stems from a night
many years ago when I was dragged to a Cambridge bar where I endured 90 minutes
of unfunny improvising from a group known as ‘The Kamikazes of Comedy.’ I
vaguely remember the performers as a bunch of pudgy young males, bearded,
probably from the theater department of a local college; I’m sure one of them
was the roommate of one of my friends, which is why I got pulled into this
painfully humorless evening in the first place. Granted, there wasn’t much the
group could do based on the suggestions coming from the customers – when
prodded for a location, the crowd could only shout“public toilet” or “gonorrhea clinic” – but I
assumed a top flight improvisation team would simply launch into a hysterical bit
about gonorrhea. Instead, they flailed around the stage, trying tobowl us over with pep squad energy instead of
wit; by the time they were done, I was done, too.

I
understand that some of our funniest performers come from improv backgrounds,
but I didn’t get a single laugh that night, a night I hadn’t thought about
until seeing Don’t Think Twice, a reasonably amusing movie about a New York
improv group on their last legs. Writer/director Mike Birbiglia has a background in stand-up comedy, and during his time
at Georgetown College, he was part of an improv troupe. I don’t think he was in
the Kamikazes of Comedy, but he seems cut from the same cloth. He’s pudgy and
bearded, anyway.

The
movie focuses on The Commune, a group of New York improv performers who can
hear their comedy clocks ticking. One of them has been plucked from the team to
be part of Weekend Live (a barely disguised version of SNL). The others, having
lost their performance space, do gigs around the city for an ever diminishing audience.
We also see them at their dull day jobs; they deliver sandwiches, hand out
samples in a supermarket, and, of course, teach improv classes. We’re spared
the old line about “Those can’t do, teach,” but the implication is there. At
night, though, they still hit the stage and live out their improvisational
dreams. One of the players even hauls out the famous quote from Del Close (the
Stanislavsky of improvisational theater), about how watching a scene created on
the fly is like watching people assemble a plane while it’s in the air. But for
all of its crowing about the art and nobility of improv, the movie doesn’t
get interesting until seeing one of their own make it to television brings out
the group’s jealousy and bitterness. These comedians are bitter fucks, indeed.

Birbiglia
gives each of the characters some reality to juggle. One’s father is dying.
Another, played by Birbiglia, is nearing 40 and wondering if his comedy prime
is over. The others suffer from a fear of moving forward; one gets her chance
to audition for Weekend Live, and has a sort of meltdown in the lobby. Even the
fellow who makes it onto the TV show has to struggle – his old pals at The
Commune are nudging him to help with their careers, and Weekend Live itself is
a bit of an embalmed institution. “Thank me if I don’t fire you at the end of
the season,” says the stand-in for Lorne Michaels.

Ultimately,
Don’t Think Twice is quite watchable.
Even if the ending is corny, I like how Birbiglia shows in very clear terms
that some people make it in the entertainment business, and some don’t, and it
has to less do with talent than it does with timing and bluster. Where the
movie flopped for me is due to it not being funny. Admittedly, I’m a tough
crowd, but I couldn’t imagine any of these characters getting into
network television, certainly not based on anything they do in the movie. The gamble a
director takes when depicting the world of comedy is that the
material had better be funny. Here, it’s not.

Kate
Miccui, who plays one of The Commune members and should’ve been used more (she plays a tired, unhappy version of
herself, and I wish Birbiglia had allowed her to cut loose), has a good line
about a character she sees on television. The bit, she says, sounds funny but
it’s really not. That’s Don’t Think Twice
in a nutshell. This might explain why two thirds of the audience walked out of
the screening I attended. I stayed with it till the end, but I had to bite my
tongue to keep from shouting, “Gonorrhea clinic!”

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Max Rose is one of those movies
where a bunch of old geezers stop to reminisce about their favorite jazz music,
and before you know it,they’re all
miming to a jazz recording. There should be an immediate moratorium regarding any sort
of musical mime act in movies. It always looks dumb, and I can’t imagine anyone
finds it amusing or funny, even if it gives us a chance to admire the still
impressive mime skills of a near 90-year-old Jerry Lewis as the title
character, a once semi-famous jazz pianist who, apparently, can still mime
some.

Most
of Lewis’ performance is worth watching, even if Max Rose is grossly sentimental. You may not find a better
performance in a worse movie this year, or next year. Max Rose wants so badly to hit our heartstrings with bromides about
aging and death and love, but it trips over its own good intentions. If only
the movie had relaxed a little, as Lewis does in his performance, it might’ve
succeeded. Instead, it wants to hit us over the head and remind us that this is
sad stuff we’re watching, that life is filled with melancholy, and in the end
we all croak, so we’d better start being nice to each other. The movie is like
a big hug from an unpleasant and dull family member.

In
thebeginning, we see Rose and his
family outside a hospital where his wife of 67 years has just died.We see him alone, wandering around their big
old house, struggling with can openers.Then he finds a series of clues that lead him to believe his wife once
had an affair, decades ago, and he begins to crumble at the thought of such a
thing. He drives his son (Kevin Pollak) and granddaughter (KerryBishé)batty with his anger, and when he seems to
be losing touch with reality, they ship him to an assisted living community. He
amuses himself by making potholders and reading Sue Grafton novels, but the
affair claws at him; through a series of unlikely circumstances, he’s able to
meet the man who may have had a fling with his wife. But all ends well.
Writer/director Daniel Noah wouldn’t send us away without making everyone happy.

We’ve
seen this movie before in various forms, and we know it by heart. To Noah’s
credit, he allows Lewis to walk the landscape of the story in his own sweet
time, and as has been his case since the 1940s, Lewis’ timing is flawless. And
though his clown’s face has aged, Lewis can still, with just a slight downturn
of an eye, indicate a world of sorrow.

Lewis
also manages to muscle his way through the flashback scenes, where we see him
with his late wife (Claire Bloom); he even makes those scenes palatable. When she reads to him
from a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, he looks at her with awe, with love; he
conjures up feelings and shows them without saying a word. Actors of greater
renown would fail at this very thing.

The
rest of the cast, unfortunately, appear to be acting in a television sitcom.

An
exception is Dean Stockwell as the man who tried to steal Rose’s wife. He gives
his role hell, but even he’s a cliché; he’s an old Hollywood player, bedridden,
surrounded by awards and mementoes, wearing himself out with epic coughing
jags. A movie where Lewis and Stockwell went toe-to-toe for 90 minutes might’ve
been interesting. Who knows what those two veterans would’ve pulled out?

The
movie, apparently, has been kicking around for a few years; it appeared at Cannes
in 2013 to an indifferent reception, and has been retooled for this 2016 release. Prior
to that, it took Noah some time to finance the project. Lewis signed on early
and stayed with it. Did he deserve better? Perhaps. But no one else has been
willing to use Lewis in recent years, and this, perhaps, gives us one last
glimpse of him.

He
has several moments where he steals the movie and shoves it into his pocket for
a second. My favorite was when he was at the seniors’ home, sitting through an agonizing
Sunday afternoon with his son and granddaughter. Then, as if to break up the monotony, he reveals the
potholders he’s made in a crafts class. “Look what I made,” he says, displaying
them seemingly out of thin air. “They’re shaped like kidneys.” The moment is
loaded: he’s playing the slightly addled grandpa who has given in to his
surroundings, but he’s still Jerry Lewis; the timing, always the timing, is
impeccable.

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

I saw Don’t
Breathe at the AMC Loews Boston Common, one of those gigantic 20-screen
movie theater/amusement parks that shows a half hour of coming
attractions.Instead of sitting through
advertisements for all of the upcoming remakes, I wandered around the enormous
lobby and took in the selection of movie posters decorating the corridors.
Eddie Murphy and Johnny Depp were well-represented, and I noticed plenty of
Star Wars stuff, and a cheapo reprint of the original Rocky. To someone born, say, during the Bill Clinton era, I’m sure
these all seem like old, quaint entertainments. I wondered how Don’t Breathe would be thought of in 40
years. After sitting through it, I don’t think it will be thought of at all.

As I
made my way into the cavernous theater I noticed a PSA was on. It was the
movie’s director, Fede Alvarez, thanking the audience for coming. There’s no
better place to see a movie like this, he was saying, than on a big screen in a
room surrounded by strangers. I agreed with him, but I couldn’t remember ever
seeing such an announcement. Granted, the movie business claims to be on wobbly
legs, what with streaming services and various other platforms treating your
local Cineplex to a death by 1,000 cuts, but are things so dire that Alvarez
has to appear onscreen to thank us for coming?

The
audience didn’t seem to need thanks. From what I could tell, they enjoyed this
movie for what it was: a 90-minute thriller with lots of blood and violence,
and enough twists and turns to keep them, if not on the edge of their seats, at
least partly awake. Now and then a female customer would let out a squeal, but
it was a generally polite crowd for a horror movie, not like the madness that
used to go on during a typical 1980s splatter flick.The plot: a trio of teenage burglars break
into the home of a blind man. They think he’s sitting on a big pile of cash. What
they don’t count on is that he’s a war veteran with a bad temper, and even
without eyesight he can track them down in the dark and punish them. He also
has an underground lair worthy of Hannibal Lecter, and is conducting some
unsavory activities down there involving artificial insemination. He’s a hoss,
too, bulging out of his t-shirt like the Toxic Avenger, and absorbing dozens of
blows to the head with various crowbars and hammers, anything the plucky young
intruders can throw at him. He’s Jason Voorhees with glaucoma.

After a
fairly routine first act, with the trio of thieves trying to solve tricky alarm
systems, Alvarez kicks the movie into a frenzy. His directing style is akin to
an angry man who knocks the dinner dishes to the floor. He’s a loud director,
not bothered with finesse, preferring instead to grab any cliché within reach
and throttle it, up to and including: creaking floors, dark rooms, dark
hallways, people stuck in enclosed spaces, people falling through glass, women
held captive, gardening tools through the gut, gunshot wounds to the head,
growling Rottweilers, weird sex stuff, and of course, the menacing blind dude
stalking the underage burglars like the big bad wolf stalking the three little
pigs. Alvarez, who co-wrote the screenplay, gives each character a dollop of backstory –
Roxanne (Jane Levy), for instance, is burgling so she can raise enough money to
escape her horrid family and move to California with her little sister – but
humanizing these characters feels arbitrary, like something learned in film
school.

Ultimately,
the movie is no different than a bunch of others that have come out in the past
20 or 30 years. There are some teens, and a bad guy, and around and ‘round they
go. Alvarez probably thinks he has done something unusual in that we’re
supposed to be cheering for Roxanne to steal from a blind man; the joke is on
him because I was rooting for the villain, played with gusto by Stephen Lang.

I’ve
heard that horror movies are making a comeback. They can be produced cheaply,
and there’s always an audience for them. Look at any streaming movie app, and
you’ll find hundreds of them, most made in recent years. But the truth is that
the horror movie now occupies the spot where the western stood in the 1960s; the TV networks have a ton of horror programming,
while the big studios spend their money on other things. In the meantime, the
studios hope a guy like Alvarez can score while not running up the budget. It’s
a fair strategy. Still, the preshow ‘thank you’ sounded a bit like an apology.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

My favorite description of The
Rolling Stones comes from Tom Wolfe in one of his early Esquire pieces, back before Esquire
was dumbed down for the internet generation. “They’re modeled after The
Beatles,” he wrote, “only more lower class – deformed.” Hundreds have tried,
but few have pegged the Stones with Wolfe’s acid pithiness. Joel Selvin comes
close in Altamont, his comprehensive examination of the disastrous free
concert headlined by the Stones, where a local chapter of the Hells Angels
motorcycle club was hired as security. The event is remembered solely because
the Angels’ interpretation of crowd control was straight out of A Clockwork Orange; one audience member,
a gun-wielding African-American male named Meredith Hunter, bled to death after
learning his lime green suit was no match for an Angel’s blade. Since the show
took place in the final month of 1969, the killing served as a bookend for the
decade, “a stain,” Selvin writes, “that wouldn’t wash out of the fabric of the
music.”

Though
the band comes off as idiot savants who conjure riffs right out of the
Mississippi Delta but are witless about anything else, they’re served well by
Selvin. He puts the blame for the Altamont mess squarely on their bony
shoulders, but not to where they come off as villains, just typically oblivious
rock stars. For those of us who have seen Gimme
Shelter, the grim documentary where Mick Jagger looked as if he thought he
could control the Angels, or at least distract them, with his hyper dance
moves– watch him during ‘Sympathy for
The Devil’; he’s on overdrive, and it’s not because he’s moved by Bill Wyman’s
bass grooves – and took it as gospel, Selvin clears up a few things, namely,
that the show wasn’t some kind of electrified witches’ Sabbath that went awry.
Rather, it was a perfect confluence of forces not evil but inept.

The
collection of maladroit characters is doled out with Dickensian detail – in the
first chapter alone we meet a menacing drug-dealer with a hook hand known as
“Goldfinger” – and in time we meet every low-rent hustler, hanger-on, and
self-made businessman who thought he could turn a derelict speedway on the
outer reaches of San Francisco Bayinto
rock ‘n’ roll manna. As for the Stones, they’d missed out on Woodstock and,
Jagger in particular, felt they’d lost some cachet. What better way to regain
their standing in America than by aligning with the new hip bands of the day,
the Airplane, the Dead, etc.? Jagger, surmises Selvin, thought the Stones could
trump The Beatles, and Woodstock, if they could pull off a big free show for
some California hippies. Why else would he hire a film crew to record the
thing? The Stones wanted a movie chronicle of their American coronation. But
instead of A Hard Day’s Night, they
got the death of Meredith Hunter. How ironic that the Stones, those cheeky
purveyors of all things black, would provide a soundtrack for the fatal knifing
of a black man.

By the
book’s end, Selvin returns to where most of us started, solemnly declaring the Altamont
concert as the hammer that crushed the sixties. He can’t help but be
heavy-handed about it, even suggesting the Stones never again played so
well,an idea I don’t buy. Nor do I go
along with his dismissal of the Angels’ favorite deterrent – the pool cue. I
happen to think the cue is a great weapon – use it as a spear, or a bludgeon,
and if it happens to break over somebody’s head, you still have the short end
to use in close quarters. Selvin, who has covered the pop world for decades,is damn near brilliant during the book’s
first half, recounting the mangy crowd descending on the concert site as “a
malodorous peasant army camping the night before the Battle of Agincourt,” or
the aristocracy’sview of Jagger as “a
social novelty, an exotic beast tame enough to pet.” Even a new stash of
sinsemilla is described with great care, its “fresh, fruity flavor, almost like
tropical lawn clippings.” If only the book’s conclusion, which is as dry as a
court summons, had such flair. I guess the road to damnation is a lot more
interesting than actual damnation.

About Me

I write for various magazines, including the great CINEMA RETRO, and the Film Noir Foundation's official magazine, Noir City. Check them out if you love movies.

I currently serve as the editorial consultant for thefilmdetective.tv, a movie streaming service that does everything from restoring old films to selling a vast collection of DVDs. Download our classic movie app!

Along with movie and arts coverage, I've written about boxing for The Ring, and ESPN.com; I've written true crime stories for the short-lived HUB; and I occasionally publish historical tales in Wild West magazine. I've also written for a bunch of newspapers in the Boston area.

THIS DAZZLING TIME is where you'll find a bit of everything. I appreciate having your attention for a moment or two.